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Fossil fuels are all variations on carbon. Coal, crude oil, natural gas: when burned, they generate carbon dioxide, CO2, a greenhouse gas. So which states among the 50 generate the most CO2? It depends on how you measure it. If we focus just on energy-related CO2 emissions, Texas is the worst in absolute terms. By…

Today we’ll all watch some of America’s best athletes damage their brains. It’s Super Bowl Sunday, after all. Sure, WC knows the National Football League has put “Concussion Protocols” in place. Players who suffer an apparent concussion are made to sit out a while. But there are at least two things wrong with that “solution.”…

The Greater Sage Grouse is an iconic species of the Western United States. It’s also near-threatened. Preserving its habitat is one of the hot button issues of conservation in the United States. This is North America’s biggest grouse, with the males sometimes weighing more than six pounds. Thy are famous for their lekking behavior: the…

WC probably owes an apology to Ryan Anderson. Ryan was a Latter Day Saint, an LDS member dispatched by WC’s Mormon classmates to try to convert WC to the Mormon church back in high school. At Ryan’s insistence, WC read most of their holy book, and told Ryan it was a bunch of really stupid,…

Consider the town of Williamson, West Virginia. Population 3,191. In the ten years 2006-2016, the pharmaceutical industry sold 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills in Williamson. Or Kermit, West Virginia, population 406, which in the same 10 year interval received some 6.3 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the overwhelming…

Today, the Kettle Moraine State Trail has been subsumed into the Ice Age Trail. The latter is a 1,200 mile long trail that meanders through Wisconsin, following, more or less, the southern edge of the Laurentide Glacier. The Kettle Moraine State Trail, in 1974, was a poorly-marked, sometimes non-existent trail that twisted through Kettle Moraine…

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke at first appears to have been stricken with an attack of reasonableness. How else to explain his decision to re-think allowing the Pebble Mine to go forward? But there is less or perhaps more here then meets the eye. To understand why we need to talk about American law…